Catch of the Day

Published: July 29, 2010

Once, Greenberg writes, as many as 100 million Atlantic salmon larvae hatched every year in the upper reaches of the Connecticut River and eventually made their way south to Long Island Sound, and north from there to Greenland before returning to the Berkshire foothills to spawn. Dams, overfishing and more dams still have taken their grim toll on their descendants. Today, every piece of Atlantic salmon you’ll find at your local supermarket or fishmonger, smoked into lox, wrapped around mock crabmeat, or lying flat and orange against crushed ice, is farmed. As Greenberg explains clearly and well, the process by which that farming is undertaken threatens the future of what wild salmon remain here and in the Pacific. The amount of wild fish needed to feed farmed salmon, the threat of farmed salmon escaping and crossbreeding with wild salmon stocks, the rise of pollution from the farms themselves — when it comes to the business of domesticating salmon, Greenberg writes, “we should have chosen something else.”

FOUR FISH

The Future of the Last Wild Food

By Paul Greenberg. 266 pp.

The Penguin Press. $25.95.

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Of course we did choose something else, some of us. That fish is sea bass — branzino, as it’s mostly called on restaurant menus now — a species that once thrived in the wild along the coast of Europe, throughout the Mediterranean Sea and through the Strait of Gibraltar, along the western coasts of Portugal, Spain and France, north to England. No more, though the farmed version is a success story of ample proportions, as anyone who spends more nights than not in white-tablecloth restaurants can tell you.

Greenberg’s accounting of the 2,000-year process of learning to farm sea bass, “one that involved the efforts of ancient Roman fishermen, modern Italian poachers, French and Dutch nutritionists, a Greek marine biologist turned entrepreneur, and an Israeli endocrinologist,” reads in parts like the treatment for a Hollywood film, a toga epic in fishy smell-o-vision.

And cod? As Greenberg writes, it fueled the American economy in its early days, and good parts of the European one, too. A five-foot wooden carving of the fish hangs from the ceiling in the Massachusetts State House, to celebrate its place in the region’s history.

But industrial fishing of these tremendous and once common animals, by fishermen the world over, has led to terribly depleted stocks and closed fishing grounds — and, Greenberg reports, to a turn toward wild Alaskan pollock to fill our desire for firm, white-fleshed fish to make fish sticks and battered-fish sandwiches, and from there toward farmed Vietnamese tra and African tilapia.

These shifts, of course, come with their own nightmares and possibilities, their own showcases of human frailty in the face of commerce, greed and hunger. Greenberg’s reporting lays these out with care.

The story of the bluefin tuna, meanwhile, is one of the great tragedies of the modern age. This magnificent creature, once mostly shunned by the world’s cooks and diners for its bloody flesh unsuitable for human consumption, now teeters almost on the edge of extinction, principally because the world’s nations cannot agree to the one measure that will guarantee its future: a total ban on its commercial harvest, in all waters.

“The passion to save bluefin is as strong as the one to kill them,” Greenberg writes, “and these dual passions are often contained within the body of a single fisherman.” “Four Fish” is a marvelous exploration of that contradiction, one that is reflected in the stance and behavior of all nations that fish. It is a necessary book for anyone truly interested in what we take from the sea to eat, and how, and why.